and realized that it's not immediately evident how to do this in a uniform way. But actually, it's quite simple...getting a ClassLoader object for the bootstrap loader is just a couple of lines of code.

So what's the problem?

Well, if you're happy with a literal implementation of the pseudo-code above, there obviously isn't a problem.

The problem is that there simply isn't a ClassLoader.getBootstrapClassLoader() or equivalent method. You can try to walk up the system loader's parent hierarchy, of course, but what you're likely to find is that the bootstrap loader will be represented by null - not very useful in our circumstances.

Writing BootstrapClassLoader

So what we want is to come up with a ClassLoader implementation that delegates straight to the bootstrap loader. One option would be to override loadClass to simply call Class.forName with the above arguments, but there's actually an even easier way: